In the House of Blue Lights (Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction)

In the House of Blue Lights is an award-winning collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern folklore, but the blue also refers to the blue of the globe as seen from space and the blue lights that flicker behind closed eyelids in the house of the imagination.

“It was January when he brought her here. She had accepted that on the maps of the world there were these green and brown places called continents floating in the cradle of blue, and that these continents had centers and that she would be living there and that it would take her for the rest of her life at least a full day, by train, to reach the ocean. She married my grandfather believing that their river would be blue. She pictured something like the Gulf, a warm vein in a landscape she’d seen only in photographs or paintings. She had never in her life seen snow. She pictured her married self as a blue-eyed princess living by the blue water in a world of snow and ice. With a blue sky that stretched from east to west . . .

But you know how, when you head north toward the Great Lakes, somewhere in Tennessee or Kentucky you can see ahead of you, in the winter months, how the sky lowers its slab of gray and there’s that line of opaque clouds like a wool blanket being pulled up over your head until you can’t see anything outside of it?” ―Excerpt from “Blue” by Susan Neville, In the House of Blue Lights